Examining Category Fraud At The Oscars - Awards Outlook
Photo from The Hollywood Reporter
Awards analysis is provided by Sean from @MathTeacherMovies.
Every year there are several Oscar races that raise the topic of category fraud, where actors with supporting performances run in the lead categories and other actors that have clear leading performances run in supporting. The arguments for these situations end up feeling a bit tired, but this year two front runners are glaringly obvious examples of category fraud… to the point that it will be difficult to ignore them.
Usually category fraud happens when the performers have a better chance of winning the race in a different category, much like when Viola Davis walked away with the Supporting Performance win for Fences. However, sometimes the performer wants their character to be considered a lead like Michelle Williams in The Fabelmans or Lily Gladstone in Killers of the Flower Moon, both of whom could have easily won in their respective supporting races.
It's interesting to determine what makes a character a lead and what makes them supporting. There are many that will say that it should have to do with screen time in the movie, but that is not so simple. Anthony Hopkins won the Oscar for lead actor in The Father with a limited amount of screentime and yet there is a strong argument that he was truly the lead because the film centers around him. On the other end is Mahershala Ali in Green Book, who some argue is a co-lead because of how often he is on camera, but the story doesn't center around him (one of the problems with the film). It is so much about how long a character is in a film, but more about them being the center of the story. Therefore, the argument between lead or supporting can be more subjective.
A very misunderstood aspect of the awards race is that the performers have a large say in what category they run in. This is how Lakieth Stanfeild ended up as a supporting actor for Judas and the Black Messiah, even though he is arguably the lead. However, most of the time the Academy follows what the campaign asks with one of the primary examples of the opposite being Kate Winslet campaigning for her supporting performance in The Reader but getting nominated and eventually winning for lead instead.
The discussions of category fraud usually become very stale because most of the time an argument could be made that a character could either be lead or supporting, often such a gray area. However, this year two of the Oscar front runners are Kieran Culkin in A Real Pain for Best Supporting Actor and Zoe Saldana in Emilia Pérez for Best Supporting Actress. It should be made clear that both of these performances are stellar and both performers deserve to be holding an oscar in a few months, but neither of them are playing supporting characters. In A Real Pain there could be an argument that Jesse Eisenberg is the lead character, but it's quite easy to see that him and Culkin are both co-leads. Saldana is almost more of a lead character in Emilia Pérez rather than Karla Sofia Gascon who is playing the titular character.
How can this problem be solved? Well there is no clear answer and the rule of having minimum or maximum screen times would not fix it. Perhaps a step in the right direction might be that actors need to sign up for certain categories and then get a potential approval, but then that once again puts a rubric to a question that is too subjective to pin down. It might be best to let academy voters decide instead of campaigns, but this could also lead to many different problems. There is no great solution that won't cause other problems, but it will definitely be interesting.